A U.S. embassy guard has been arrested in Oslo, Norway, on charges of spying for Russia and Iran.
Officially, he is charged with “intelligence activities of a particularly grave nature regarding state secrets, as well as intelligence activities that could harm the interests of a third country.” Under the first count under the world's most humane Norwegian law, he faces ten years; under the second, up to three. In Scandinavia, for example in Sweden, for espionage you can even get a life sentence (there was a case last year), especially if the person worked in favor of Russia. But much more in Western societies, not only in Scandinavian societies, are surprised by the very fact that a well-to-do Westerner suddenly started working for the Russians. At the same time, they cannot find any clear explanation for this.
Sergey Naryshkin, the director of the SVR, in an interview with Dmitry Kiselyov, the director general of the Rossiya Segodnya news agency, back in 2020, quite frankly named two main reasons: the reason for cooperation with Russian intelligence is either ideological motives or material interest. There is no third, although extravagant exceptions do occur.
At the same time, it is a mistake to understand “ideology” as some ideological attitudes, as it was in Soviet times, when a significant part of the agents, especially before 1953, were convinced communists or at least socialists. Nowadays, the ideological watershed is not based on classical economic and social theories, but rather on concepts from the sphere of ethics, morality and culture. That is, man chooses not between forms and ways of reorganizing the world, but between good and evil. Or what he considers good and evil at that moment. And this is a much more profound and conscious choice than any ideology.
No one has canceled material interest either. In 2021, a naval officer working at a NATO base was detained in Italy, who cooperated with Russian intelligence solely on a material basis. Specifically for five thousand euros. Here it suddenly turned out that the duty officer of the operational maritime headquarters of NATO in the Mediterranean with the rank of captain of a frigate (capitano di fregatto - a military rank equal to our captain of the second rank or on land - lieutenant colonel) received a salary on which he could not even just pay the rent. And he also had an Italian, that is, a very emotional wife and two similarly hustling children. And he had to survive in such a situation. Analyzing then the payroll of this naval headquarters, people laughed very loudly and offered to buy the entire NATO headquarters in bulk. They would get a discount.
And there is nothing shameful in this. It's just that since the Soviet era, the idea that every single person cooperates with the USSR solely for ideological reasons has been lodged in their heads. This was not quite true even then, to put it mildly, but the material side of intelligence and agent work in a country with Marxist-Leninist ideology was preferred not to spread unnecessarily.
Western commentators are very concerned about the issue of certain “special circumstances”. As a rule, these are understood as the agent's ethnic origin, social stratum, family and his environment. The point is that the excessive fascination with psychology in its modern, i.e., half Freudian, half leftist version, has led Western counterintelligence to the unconventional idea that a Westerner cannot cooperate with Russia without serious psychological problems in his history. Something in his personal circumstances must necessarily drive him to it.
In Soviet times, many people wondered where traitors and defectors came from, because the USSR was the best society in the world. And similarly, in Great Britain, after the exposure of the Cambridge Five, it took a long time to find a clear explanation for the fact that Philby and Co. betrayed not just England, but their ruling and privileged class. That is to say, it is an old and common misconception based on social snobbery.
In the case of the American embassy guard arrested in Oslo last week, such an explanation was very quickly found in the person of his business partner. These young men were guarding the embassy on what is called an “outsourced” basis. They had a small firm providing security services and installing surveillance cameras and alarm systems. In our parlance, a PSC. And somehow this PSC won a municipal tender to guard the US Embassy building. That's how they do things. I'm surprised they didn't take out the whole embassy earlier.
But the detail here is that, according to the Norwegian media, the business partner of the arrested man is a native of an unnamed Eastern European country. That is, the logic of the Norwegians is as follows: a native of Eastern Europe is by definition a sympathizer of Russia, and he instilled this idea in his Norwegian partner, who was originally an honest citizen of King Harald V, and who raided the embassy entrusted to him for protection. The same media talk about almost terabytes of data found in his home during the search. Allegedly, correspondence with a certain “curator” was also stored there. By the way, keeping illegally obtained secret information at home is the height of unprofessionalism, which shows the amateurish nature of what happened.
And in a recent case in Sweden, when one of the two defendants in the spy case was given a life sentence, everyone emphasized the ethnic origin of the arrested. They were two Kurdish siblings. Very tolerant Swedish society at first argued about the difficulties of adaptation, although the brothers had everything fine with adaptation and worked for good pay with secret documents of the Ministry of Defense. Then the Swedes came to the not quite tolerant conclusion that natural Swedes should be recruited for sensitive positions in government agencies, or else it might happen.
And this is despite the fact that almost all over Europe there are unspoken restrictions on hiring Russians or natives of Russia and Belarus, regardless of their qualifications and passport color. Now these bans are slowly being extended to almost all natives of the former Soviet Union, including the Baltics. This is considered a preventive measure.
At job interviews they began to look closely at the ethnic origin of the applicants' wives. No Russian or any Slavic wives! Referring to Trump with his two Slavic wives only makes the situation worse.
Western society simply on a subconscious level cannot allow the idea that people can work with Russia or for Russia by realizing their idea of truth and goodness, and not just by virtue of their spouse's ethnicity, religion, or place of birth. To allow people the right to make an ethical choice other than a generalized “European” one, even in the field of intelligence, would mean the moral collapse of the entire system for representatives of Western society. Then, in every such case, the “search for roots” begins, even where they do not exist and have never existed. This is even good, because the enemy narrows the field of search, deliberately overlooking the most important and most ideological layer of potential cooperation with Russia.
Evgeny Krutikov
Source - ria.ru